Our book “Famine in the West” was written during the early months of 2007 and events have moved quickly in the short time since then.
Wheat prices have doubled over the past year and other grains, legumes and oilseeds have risen by at least 50%. This causes people to ask,
“Are the severe food shortages forecast in the book starting to happen already?”
The answer is that we don’t know, but probably not. Without strong worldwide action by governments, we are heading for a disaster, but the timing can only be guesswork. Starting on page 105 of this book we show two fictional scenarios of the years leading up to 2025, simply because that is the year when the world population should reach 8 billion.
We think that in the next few years , oil and grain prices will fluctuate wildly but the world will most likely get by without a major catastrophe. Farmers will respond to higher prices and will use the small remaining reserves of land such as European set -aside, to sow more acreage, therefore temporarily making up for the 25 million acres of cropland lost each year to desertification, new cities, roads, etc. They will also need to make up for the extra millions of acres being used for biofuel. Although higher prices have put some biofuel projects at risk, government schemes such as the renewable fuel obligation will ensure that many will go ahead.
Higher prices will also mean that the poorest people in the world will have to tighten their belts even further. They are already spending most of their income on food, so when prices rise they have no option but to buy less. Lower consumption by the very poor will help to off-set increased consumption by the millions of newly prosperous urban dwellers in the developing world.
Providing the inputs of fertiliser and pesticides are available to grow both food and fuel, we should get by but it is unlikely that world reserve grain stocks will be rebuilt to safe levels. The real crunch will come when the inevitable big event occurs. Droughts and floods have always happened, and are happening now, but when we get a severe drought in a major region such as the U.S. mid west that lasts for more than one year, we simply will not have the food reserves to cope or extra land to use. The other big risk is that with oil supplies on a similar knife edge as food, our oil dependent farming would suffer if events in the volatile middle east caused real oil shortages. A reserve tank of diesel on the farm could be a good investment.
When a real food crisis happens, panic buying, hoarding and speculation will make things much worse.